SHE is better known for her protests than her performance abilities, but this weekend former socialist MSP Rosie Kane will take to the stage in a show about her life.
In An Evening With Rosie Kane, she'll play an altogether different persona from her political one although, she insists, politics will remain at the heart of her new endeavour.
Ms Kane, 50, has written the comic show about her life and will perform at Glasgow's Tron Theatre tomorrow. And she claims the audience will be in for a few surprises.
Her most controversial moment as a politician came when she had to swear an oath of allegiance to the Queen when taking her seat at the Holyrood parliament in 2003. The socialist firebrand wrote on the palm of her hand: "My oath is to the people."
She promised to shake up parliament but lost her seat in 2007 before which she had suffered from clinical depression and had to take time off from Holyrood.
Spanning her entire life, the show includes musical numbers and will focus on the night she was elected.
She said: "I think people will be quite surprised by what happened that night because it's not been discussed - how I was feeling or what actually happened that night. It's about serendipity – right up until even that happy accident – and how I felt about that."
The idea for the show came after she got involved with a women's drama group which developed an anti-poverty musical, called Miss Smith, about a single mum struggling to cope. The show is due to tour Scotland in August.
An Evening With Rosie Kane was developed to raise funds to allow the group to present the not-for-profit play for free and the Tron is donating 60% of the proceeds from Ms Kane's show to the group.
Both works tackle what Ms Kane says is a lack of political theatre in Scotland.
The former Scottish Socialist MSP said: "If you can offer free theatre – but theatre that's also speaking to the poverty and saying, 'We can hear you' – that's an important political act. It's important to make people understand this is direct action, political theatre. It's got a reason behind it.
"When people are really struggling, the one thing they reach out to is theatre. But it needs to be accessible and relate to people and show it's not an elite thing."
Asked about her own show, Ms Kane, who is a grandmother, said: "I'm enjoying the opportunity because I'm not shy.
"If you stand up at parliament and you stand up at protests, then this is just another one of those things. It's a great opportunity to hopefully make people laugh and let them get involved in community theatre."
Ms Kane, who gave evidence against her party's one-time leader Tommy Sherdian at his perjury trial, will also make references to the NHS and justice.
She said: "I've always been portrayed as quite an angry person, because I am angry a lot. But I actually really enjoy comedy and have always wanted to do what I'm doing."
She admits preparing for the comedy aspects of the show has been "challenging".
She said: "When you're doing a script and playing a person, you can get a character and behave in a certain way, but I've got to behave like me."
Asked if she had plans to take her show to the Edinburgh Fringe Festival, Ms Kane said: "I would love that."
l An Evening with Rosie Kane is at the Tron Theatre on Saturday at 8pm. Tickets priced £10.
Why are you making commenting on The Herald only available to subscribers?
It should have been a safe space for informed debate, somewhere for readers to discuss issues around the biggest stories of the day, but all too often the below the line comments on most websites have become bogged down by off-topic discussions and abuse.
heraldscotland.com is tackling this problem by allowing only subscribers to comment.
We are doing this to improve the experience for our loyal readers and we believe it will reduce the ability of trolls and troublemakers, who occasionally find their way onto our site, to abuse our journalists and readers. We also hope it will help the comments section fulfil its promise as a part of Scotland's conversation with itself.
We are lucky at The Herald. We are read by an informed, educated readership who can add their knowledge and insights to our stories.
That is invaluable.
We are making the subscriber-only change to support our valued readers, who tell us they don't want the site cluttered up with irrelevant comments, untruths and abuse.
In the past, the journalist’s job was to collect and distribute information to the audience. Technology means that readers can shape a discussion. We look forward to hearing from you on heraldscotland.com
Comments & Moderation
Readers’ comments: You are personally liable for the content of any comments you upload to this website, so please act responsibly. We do not pre-moderate or monitor readers’ comments appearing on our websites, but we do post-moderate in response to complaints we receive or otherwise when a potential problem comes to our attention. You can make a complaint by using the ‘report this post’ link . We may then apply our discretion under the user terms to amend or delete comments.
Post moderation is undertaken full-time 9am-6pm on weekdays, and on a part-time basis outwith those hours.
Read the rules hereComments are closed on this article